Hacker News Reader

Comment by octonion | Hacker News Reader

No one is "anti-free speech", but some companies have decided that overt racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry violate what they've decided are reasonable terms of service. If users don't like it, there's always 8chan, Stormfront, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, Parler.

View on HN

> No one is "anti-free speech", but some companies have decided that overt racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry violate what they've decided are reasonable terms of service. If users don't like it, there's always 8chan, Stormfront, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, Parler.

There is just the racism reddit moderation agrees with and the racism reddit moderation doesn't agree with, the misogyny reddit moderation agrees with and the misogyny reddit moderation doesn't agree with.

So when you're claiming that reddit moderations are reasonable, you're just claiming they agree with who you allow and who you doesn't allow being the target of bigotry.

I consider porn a form of misogyny for instance, reddit allows porn, and some very depraved form of porn, so don't claim reddit has reasonable terms of services and fights "bigotry", you just don't care about the former.

this is a transparent gotcha attempt, op wrote "what they've decided are reasonable terms of service" and you pretend that op wrote about their own defintion of reasonable

> this is a transparent gotcha attempt, op wrote "what they've decided are reasonable terms of service" and you pretend that op wrote about their own defintion of reasonable

there is no "transparent gotcha attempt" and it's the op who is making an assumption by using the word "reasonable", it's a qualitative argument the OP is making and it's also called "projection".

it's like you're giggling behind your computer, attempting at rooting out imaginary trolls that only exist in your mind.

op made no value judgement as opposed to you

> op made no value judgement as opposed to you

Of course they did make a value judgement, it's them qualifying whatever TOS on a bunch of depraved porn ridden websites in the realm of the "reasonable". Reddit made no such statement at first place anyway...

that's some leap

but looking at it like that doesn't make people feel like they're some kind of freedom fighter (freedom to be bigoted trash)

What you say sounds reasonable and reasonable people can agree upon as good ground rules. However, it does not work out in practice that way. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, is a pretty racist person (by the MLK content of one's character definition), but I'm unaware of any major social media platforms censoring or banning him.

Yes. Even if the reedits if the world don't talk about the paradox of intolerance they act according to it and they dampen hate speech to enable free speech.

>No one is "anti-free speech"

Not only are an alarming number of people against free speech, some of them are very powerful. One is even in charge of Biden's new Ministry of Truth.[1]

Also, I remember how 2 years ago the breaking story about the emails found on Hunter Biden's laptop implicating Joe Biden in a Ukrainian money laundering scheme was "completely made up by Russians" and talking about it got you banned from every major social media site. Until it turned out to be legit, which it always was. So would that have been banned due to racism or nazis or transphobia or...some other made up reason to justify banning the discussion of it?

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10760907/Biden-star...

This is a great example of gas lighting right here.

Dear Octonian, users were banned left and right for suggesting Covid was a lab leak or for making their case for why vaccines were problematic. It isn’t just banning if extreme ideas and race, sex, and religion.

They banned the president of the United States. It’s about power and controlling the propaganda messaging apparatus.

The president of the United States should be treated no differently than other users of the service.

In this case the president repeatedly broke the rules by posting lies and dangerous misinformation. Even given that, his account was allowed to continue to break the rules for far longer than normal peoples would have been.

The parent said it’s only bigotry, the kind you’d find at Stormfront, etc, that gets you banned. So now it’s “misinformation”? Who is the arbiter of that? Which authority gets to judge that?

>Who is the arbiter of that? Which authority gets to judge that?

The owner(s) of the platform or service. As per the terms of service you agreed to in exchange for an account on that platform or service.

You forgot to mention he was banned for the insurrection. "...due to the risk of further incitement of violence..." Was their reasoning, and I think it probably prevented more violence.

I agree. Honestly, since we're talking about Trump's personal account (not even the official @POTUS account) I think he should have been banned much earlier.

I'm just pointing out that the slippery slope argument of "who gets to decide what is an isn't disinformation" on a specific platform which always gets brought up in this case has an obvious answer.

What about all the people using the platform to organize and normalize the BLM riots and looting?

A lot of them got banned? You should always report when you see people planning violence if that is what you are saying you saw.

But what about all the people banned for “misinformation” regarding Covid lab leak, etc? That was not misinformation it turns out.

The platform is pressured to arbitrate a certain way and is a political tool. Musk opening up speech will be a breath of fresh air.

There was a huge spike in unsolicited assaults on Asian americans and asian immigrants so you can see the incitement of further violence logic even if that was so much more nebulous and indirect. Private company and all. Twitter should be nationalized if the first amendment has to apply.

So you can’t criticize China because Asians Americans will see a spike in violence?

> But what about all the people banned for “misinformation” regarding Covid lab leak, etc? That was not misinformation it turns out.

The lab leak hypothesis - or rather the various theories and conspiracies that get grouped under that banner - remain just that as far as I know. I'm willing to consider it misinformation given that the obvious purpose of much of it was to implicate that the Democratic Party/WHO/Fauci in some kind of bioweapons conspiracy or feed off of anti-Chinese xenophobia. But certainly, given that it remains unproven, I would consider claims to the contrary to be misinformation.

And... what about them? Were they lined up against a wall and shot or something? Were they sent to camps? Were their homes raided and their literature burned? As far as I can tell discourse in this area never even faltered anywhere online, it continued and continues unabated still.

I think banning it makes it worse. Now they really think it’s a conspiracy. There’s always going to be stupid ideas around things. You can’t just ban it.

We can't base all of our decision making processes on whether or not they justify the delusions of the paranoid, because anything besides normalizing and spreading their beliefs will. We're already seeing dangerous societal consequences as a result of the accelerated spread of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, so I have to disagree that turning the firehose on even harder is the best possible solution.

And you're downvoting me right now for telling you the actual truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com